The audience of none (part 2): what happens when you actually stop performing
Earlier this year I wrote a piece about the relief of realizing no one is really watching you. About how most of the judgment we carry around is imaginary, how we perform our entire lives for an audience that mostly doesn’t exist. That piece resonated with a lot of people, which makes sense because the realization is genuinely liberating. Finally understanding that you can stop choreographing every move and just be yourself wakes up parts of you that you might not have known existed.
But since then, something else about this started really gnawing at me. I think there might be a “step 2,” something I overlooked the first time, which is: stopping the performance creates its own kind of problem, because once you actually internalize that no one is watching, once you really let that sink in and start living accordingly, you’re confronted with this strange question that nobody really prepares you for.
Okay, so what now?
Turns out the hard part isn’t realizing the audience is fake… I think the hard part might be figuring out what to do once all the seats are truly empty.
I keep thinking about Sartre’s concept of “bad faith” from Being and Nothingness—this idea that we constantly lie to ourselves about our own freedom because freedom is actually terrifying. When you spend most of your life performing, even the smallest decisions get filtered through an imaginary panel of judges. What to wear, what to say, how to react, what to post online, which hobbies to admit to having. There’s always this background calculation running: what will people think, will this make me look weird, is this the right move? The performance isn’t just a burden, it’s also a kind of escape from the responsibility of choosing who you actually want to be, because knowing you could choose differently is overwhelming.
And then one day you finally stop doing that calculation. You wear the thing you want to wear. You say the awkward thing out loud. You let yourself be visibly enthusiastic about something uncool… and the sky doesn’t fall. No one cares. Most people don’t even notice! The phantom audience you’ve been performing for your whole life just... wasn’t there.
That should feel purely good, right? Just freedom and relief and the joy of finally being yourself? Except it also feels disorienting, because you’ve spent so long curating and managing and presenting that when you stop, there’s this weird emptiness where all that effort used to be. You catch yourself reaching for the old scripts and then remembering… you don’t need them anymore.
Marcus Aurelius wrote constantly about living according to nature and aligning yourself with your true character rather than the roles society demands. In his Meditations he says: “Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee.” The idea being that if you imagine you’ve already died, you can stop worrying about what your life looks like to other people and just focus on living in alignment with what actually matters. But what he doesn’t tell you, what gets left out of these neat philosophical frameworks, is how profoundly disorienting it feels when you actually try to do it. Because while the performance was exhausting, it was also giving you structure. It was telling you what mattered and what didn’t, what to pay attention to and what to ignore, how to organize your days and your sense of self.
Without that structure and external validation that was acting as a form of direction, you have to actually figure out what you want to do when no one is watching. You have to decide what matters to you without the shortcut of “what would look good” or “what would people think.” And that turns out to be harder than anyone wants to admit.
Take social media, which might be the purest distillation of performance anxiety ever invented. You spend years crafting deliberate posts and images that communicate a specific version of your life. Everything is intentional, everything means something. And it’s exhausting, so you quit or step back or stop caring as much, but then interesting things happen and you get that little ping of “oh, I should capture this” followed immediately by “for who?” And you’re just standing there with your phone in your hand feeling confused about what you’re supposed to do with this moment if you’re not packaging it for consumption.
Or you’re getting dressed in the morning and you reach for the thing that looks right, and then you remember you don’t have to look right anymore, you can just wear what feels good. But what does feel good when it’s not performing a function? What do you actually like when you strip away the layer of “what does this communicate about me?” Turns out that’s not always an easy question to answer. Stopping the performance doesn’t automatically tell you who you are underneath it. That’s a separate discovery process, and it can feel surprisingly destabilizing.
These days, most days, I do things because I want to do them, not because they mean anything or communicate anything or prove anything. I wear clothes that feel good even if they look ridiculous, I spend hours reading books that won’t make me sound smart at parties, I let myself be mediocre at things I enjoy. I’ve stopped trying to optimize every moment for some imaginary highlight reel.
And honestly, it’s unsettling how good that feels because if I can be happy doing nothing impressive, and if I can feel fulfilled without anyone witnessing or validating my choices, then what was all that performing for? What were all those years of careful image management actually getting me?
There’s this concept in Buddhism called the “hungry ghost”—a being with an insatiable appetite, constantly consuming but never satisfied because they’re trying to fill a void that can’t be filled from the outside. I think that’s what we become when we live for external validation. We keep performing, keep curating, keep seeking approval, but it never quite satisfies because we’re asking other people to tell us who we are instead of figuring it out ourselves.
When you’ve spent most of your life as a hungry ghost, making choices based on external validation, your preferences get tangled up with performance, and you stop being able to tell the difference between “I like this” and “I like how this makes me look.” Between “this matters to me” and “this seems like the kind of thing that should matter to someone like me.”
And when you finally drop the performance, you don’t automatically have access to some pure, authentic self underneath, you have to intentionally and methodically untangle all of it. You have to question every preference, every impulse, every choice, every belief, and figure out which ones are actually yours and which ones are just leftover performance habits.
That process is slow and weird because it’s not just about stopping the show, it’s about building a new relationship with yourself… one that isn’t mediated by imaginary judgment or external validation. And that takes time.
I think about my twenties a lot, how much energy I poured into being the right kind of interesting, reading the right books so I could reference them casually, having opinions on things I didn’t actually care about because they seemed important, cultivating a specific aesthetic, a specific way of speaking, a specific persona that I thought would make people like me or respect me or find me compelling. And people did like me, I guess. But they liked the performance, not the person. Because I wasn’t really being a person, I was being a curated collection of choices designed to land a certain way. The real me, the one who sometimes didn’t have opinions and liked stupid things and felt uncertain and made mistakes, that person was backstage the whole time, waiting for permission to exist.
But the permission never comes from outside. You have to give it to yourself. And that’s the work that happens after you realize no one is watching.
Nietzsche had this phrase, “become who you are,” which sounds paradoxical until you understand what he means. He borrowed it from the Greek poet Pindar, but for Nietzsche it wasn’t about discovering some fixed essence that was always there waiting to be revealed. It was about creation. In The Gay Science, he writes: “We, however, want to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.” The self isn’t something you find, it’s something you make. When you stop performing, you don’t automatically become yourself. You become undefined. There’s suddenly this vacuum where the performance used to be, and humans are terrible with vacuums because we crave structure, even if that structure is imaginary. Or worse, imposed.
When the performance and audience get stripped away, it becomes clear how much they were organizing your sense of self. The performance gave you an identity, even if that identity was constructed for an audience that didn’t exist. It told you what kind of person you were supposed to be, what mattered, how to spend your time. You’d think removing all that would feel liberating, but when you remove a structure without replacing it with something else, you don’t get freedom—you get drift.
This is hard to talk about because it sounds like I’m advocating for going back to performing, which I’m not, but I think we’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story about authenticity. The fantasy is that if we strip away enough layers, we’ll eventually hit bedrock—some authentic core that’s been there all along, just waiting to be uncovered. But that’s not how it works. There is no fixed self underneath waiting to be discovered. There’s just you, making choices, building an identity in real time, always.
The difference is whether you’re building it consciously or unconsciously, whether you’re choosing the structure or inheriting it from imaginary judgment, whether you’re performing for phantom critics or for the person you’re actually trying to become.
And the annoying thing is, you can kill the external audience and still have the internal one running at full volume. The critic in your head doesn’t disappear just because you deleted Instagram or stopped caring what strangers think. That voice is still there, still performing the same function it always did, telling you what’s acceptable, what’s worthy, what counts as a life well lived.
So the real work, then, isn’t removing the audience, the real work is choosing who that audience is. And the only answer that makes any sense, the only one that doesn’t just recreate the same problem with different faces, is you. Not you as you are right now in this moment, but you as the person you’re trying to become. Your future self—the one who actually benefits from the choices you’re making today.
This reminds me of something Michelangelo supposedly said about sculpture—that he saw the form already existing in the marble, and his job was just to chip away everything that wasn’t the statue. It’s a beautiful metaphor, but it’s also misleading, because Michelangelo still had to make every single choice about where to chisel, what to keep, what to remove. The statue didn’t emerge on its own. He had to have a vision of what he was trying to create and work toward it deliberately.
I think that’s what this is. We’re not discovering who we are—we’re actively sculpting it. And the only person who should be guiding that process is our future self, the person we’re trying to become.
None of this is about impressing yourself. It’s about the difference between asking “what will people think?” and “will I be glad I did this?” Those are completely different questions, and they lead to completely different lives.
There’s no neat timeline for this, no checklist of steps that takes you from performing to authentic. It’s more like a slow rewiring, a gradual shift in how you relate to yourself and your choices. Some days you’ll feel completely free, unburdened by imaginary judgment, clear about what you want. Other days you’ll catch yourself mid-performance and have to consciously choose to stop, and you won’t be sure if you’re choosing authenticity or just a different kind of performance.
But there’s profound relief in this realization, once you sit with it long enough. Your life becomes more meaningful when you stop trying to make it look meaningful to other people. The questions get more direct, and the answers get clearer.
The audience has always been empty, we just couldn’t see it through the lights we pointed at ourselves. And now that we can see it, now that we know no one was ever really watching the way we thought they were, we get to decide what we actually want to do with all this freedom. Some of us will keep performing anyway, just differently. Some of us will stop entirely. Most of us will probably oscillate between the two, never quite sure which version is more real.
The good news is, you get to choose who you’re performing for. And once you realize the only sensible answer is yourself, the person you’re trying to become, everything gets simpler. Not easier, but simpler. It’s no longer about being watched or not watched, it’s about being intentional. It’s the difference between performing for approval and building for coherence.
You’re not trying to impress your future self, you’re trying to become them. And that requires a completely different kind of attention than the performance we were doing before.
So maybe I was wrong earlier this year. Or not wrong, but incomplete. The audience of none was never quite right. It’s the audience of one. Not the crowd, not the critics, not the phantom judges… just you. Your future self. The only person who actually has to live with the choices you’re making right now.
Turns out that’s the only audience that’s ever mattered…
PS: If you enjoyed this post, I recommend “Most of your limitations aren’t real and you can *actually* just do things” or “In 10 years, you’ll wish you started today” next.
As always, thanks for reading with me. If you enjoyed this post, please consider hitting the like button and/or sharing it to help boost its visibility. I appreciate you so much. xo
This is an important point, because we've been molded to always be "on", always assume that "someone" is watching. Even before social media was a thing we were taught to act and behave certain ways at home and in public; that there would be consequences if we didn't. And as you pointed out that leads to a lack of understanding of who the core of "us" is.
And it's not a "bedrock"; the core of us is a mutable, changeable substance that is reactive to the emotions, thoughts, and environments around us. It should be; we should never have been shoehorned into specific performances for specific audiences. But you're right in that finding your way when the core of you is such a mutable substance is hard. Just like water in a glass gets structure from that glass, we feel like we need the structure of social expectations around us. But unlike the water we can change our composition at will. We don't need heat or cold to become gas or solid; we simply need to read the room and change ourselves to fit.
How do you reconcile this ‘stripped-down self’ with the reality of working online? Personally, I can stop performing (they say it's the autism in me, I say it's the sane part). Professionally, it feels harder. When your work depends on visibility and coherence, how do you avoid slipping back into Performance-You?